Cathy Newman: “The internet is being written by men with an agenda”

Cathy Newman, critically acclaimed for reaching top-tier meme status in under 30 minutes, today for the first time spoke at length about The Interview. It’s a decent human interest story by The Guardian, definitely worth reading if you’re wondering about the woman behind the ideological persona, but let’s just skip to the good stuff.

The Guardian introduces Jordan Peterson in its signature style, before reflecting on what happened during the interview.

“In the past few weeks, two of her interviews have gone viral, with unpleasant results; the first with Jordan Peterson, a controversial Canadian psychologist who has attracted a following among the “alt-right” (…).”

A lazy bit of framing surely, since it was only yesterday that Peterson tweeted his most recent refutal of and challenge to the ‘alt-right‘ who, by the way, hate the guy. But, whatever. We want to hear Cathy about the interview:

“Was it my finest interview? Probably not. If you’re a footballer, you don’t always push the ball to the back of the net. You win some, you lose some.”

Oh, that’s it? Yeah, that’s it, before starting at length about the torrents of ‘online abuse’ that is said to have come her way in the aftermath:

“I’ve thought of coming off social media because why should I have to deal with all this crap? It’s too time-consuming, but why should I or any woman be silenced? It gives the trolls exactly what they want. (…)

The mockery and abuse of women in the public eye is not an acceptable way of doing business in the 21st century. Either the social media companies have to grapple with that or governments will. It is not beyond the wit of man or machine to detect and sift ‘cuntbitchwhore’ from genuine satirical comment. It is corrosive to women, no matter how tough you are, to log on and see that torrent of abuse.”

Later on, one learns that:

“The internet is being written by men with an agenda. (…) I wasn’t prepared for the torrent of abuse after [the Peterson interview]. People say: ‘Why don’t you just block them?’ But there were literally thousands of abusive tweets – it was a semi-organised campaign. It ranged from the usual ‘cunt, bitch, dumb blonde’ to ‘I’m going to find out where you live and execute you’.”

It’s worth pointing out here that Cathy is not making this stuff up. Being the investigative TOC journalists that we are, some Twitter searches on “Cathy Newman cunt” and “Cathy Newman bitch” definitely do result in near-endless hits.

A search on “Cathy Newman execute“, however, only resulted in a tweet saying “Cathy Newman would have voted to execute Socrates“, which, well, you know, is probably true.

Other searches on “Cathy Newman” combined with words such as “kill” “kneecap” “shot” “shoot” “rape” and “die“, don’t seem to result in any threats, but we might be missing something. After all, it’s induction, not deduction.

The best way for her to set this fiasco straight is still to have a new sit-down with Peterson. An invitation he extended, but she has yet to answer. If she declines, eternal meme-hood might be the price.